Black Roots: Grounded and Growing Toward Collective Futures is a conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) presented by the Black Student Union (formerly African American Student Union) and AfricaGSD. This event investigates the Black praxes of making space, taking space, and creating “tools for living” through three interconnected themes: Black theologies, Black ecologies, and Black geographies. It explores the complex relationships between belief systems, environments, and lands that shape Black communities across the diaspora. Design serves as both terrain and a tool to explore lineage, land, and lore as intertwined forces shaping our communities. Through keynote panels, workshops, performances, and creative exchanges, the conference critically examines histories of migration, displacement, and resilience in the context of ongoing political and environmental crises. Through dialogue and creative expression, Black Roots foregrounds how Black spatial practices shape, and are shaped by resistance, resilience, and regeneration.

Kiki Cooper is a designer-activist and serves as a cochair for the Black Roots: Black in Design Conference 2025. They received a bachelor’s in landscape architecture from Penn State and are pursuing a master’s of landscape architecture in urban design and master’s in design engineering at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Their practice combines food security, design justice, education, community building, youth empowerment, queer identities, and mental health. Working with Design As Protest, Dark Matter U, and Bruxas Bruxas, Cooper activates their passions through collaboration, art, research, and academia as a core organizer in each organization respectively. Cooper was appointed to the executive board of the Students With Psychosis global organization. They are coauthor of “Design Justice 101” (Architect Magazine, 2023), and a contributor to “Bruxas Bruxas Arts Collective: Get Bodied: Inverting the Witch to Summon a New Commons” in Curating with Care (Routledge, 2024). Cooper is the recipient of Boston’s Neighborhood and Downtown Activation Grant launching in 2026.

Ariana Chanelle Everett is a master’s of urban planning candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She holds two undergraduate degrees from Arizona State University: a bachelor’s of science in urban planning and a bachelor’s of science in sustainability with a concentration in economics. Everett’s work is grounded in a deep passion for housing justice, with a focus on the critical intersections of housing, law, economics, and policy. Her academic and professional pursuits reflect a commitment to equitable development and transformative urban policy, especially as it relates to affordability, displacement, and systemic inequality. Everett brings a multidisciplinary approach to addressing housing challenges, combining spatial analysis with policy insight to imagine more just futures for urban communities. She plans to begin law school, where she will further deepen her expertise and continue advancing structural change through the legal system.

Rami Elegbede is a master’s of architecture student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a cochair of the Black Roots: Black in Design Conference 2025. She holds a first class degree in architecture from the University of Cambridge, where she founded @blackspace.cambridge to advocate for inclusive public spaces that empower marginalized communities. Her professional work includes coauthoring a design guide for neurodivergent accessibility and contributing to affordable housing projects and cultural institutions such as the Natural History Museum Collections Building in the United Kingdom. At Harvard, Elegbede’s research critically engages with the intersections of architecture, policy, and environmental justice, challenging spatial inequities and examining the sociopolitical forces that shape the built environment. Her work advances design as a tool for social and environmental transformation, centering the experiences of underrepresented communities while fostering resilience, inclusivity, and systemic change through architectural practice.

Lily Saki is a master’s of architecture student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a cochair of the Black Roots: Black in Design Conference 2025. She holds a bachelor’s in architecture with a concentration in adaptive interventions from Wentworth Institute of Technology. She has hands-on experience in construction from her time at John Moriarty and Associates, and further design expertise from the Adjaye Associates office in Ghana, where she worked on projects that pushed the boundaries of contemporary architecture. Her work is driven by a commitment to equity, and she is particularly interested in how architecture can address social challenges. She also has a passion for creating resilient spaces that prioritize both environmental responsibility and human wellbeing.

Dana McKinney White is a licensed architect, urban planner, and educator, and is an outspoken advocate for social justice and equity through design. She contextualizes people and their broader communities throughout her work. Her academic and professional work integrates wellness, progressive public policy, and inclusive economics into innovative design solutions to benefit the most vulnerable populations. White currently serves as an assistant professor of urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) in the Department of Urban Planning and Design. She is also the cofounder of enFOLD Collective, an interdisciplinary architecture, planning, and design practice, which positions community voices at the center of its projects, and is the founder of Studio KINN, a consulting practice that advises on design and planning considerations of social justice, equity, and alternatives to incarceration. While completing her graduate work at the GSD, White cofounded the inaugural Black in Design Conference.

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design educates leaders in design, research, and scholarship to make a resilient, just, and beautiful world.